Week 8 – WINOL, Second Radio Show, and WinchXtra Bonfire

WINOL

This week was by far the most busiest and stressful this semester, but it was full of learning points and I have gained valuable experience from it all.

I continued my producer role on WINOL, and we had the Senior Editor of Sky News, Ian Sherwood, in as guest editor. He was a fantastic guest editor and gave great advice and help to us all throughout the Wednesday. For me in particular, it was fantastic to have him sat next to me while I put together the headlines. He helped me understand how to use the best quotes and use sound effectively, along with the styling of the script – which clashed with Ian Anderson’s BBC scripting knowledge, which was a great teaching point.

The stories on WINOL this week were absolutely fantastic, and we had Nick Clegg as our main story – incredible!

On top of this, I reworked one of Alex Delaney’s packages and rescripted it, which was the Sajid Javid package second in the bulletin. I was told that my use of sound was more experienced and that was down to my understanding of Radio.

Due to this busy Wednesday, and the hectic day of radio on the Thursday, I was unable to finish my WinchXtra package which was a great mistake in my judgement of time allocation. It was said that it was due to being overly ambitious, and that it wasn’t considered a bad thing, so I am going to take this in my stride and work to become more efficient and manage my time more realistically.

RADIO

Radio on the thursday, however, went very well.

The music was better managed, but could be tidied up much more – I want to create more of a consistent feel and come away from the Sound Radio beds, my presenting was much more toned down and much better, and the packages were generally way more interesting and more relevant to the demographic.

In post production, I was able to edit the show to sound much smoother (removal of clicking, no dead air). However, I stylised the bedding in the wrong way – I was matching it to the general output from the jockeys on BBC Radio 1, rather than Newsbeat. There is a major different – no major dipping of music, consistent flow, slight change in music when going on to a new topic.

I scripted this week’s show, and I feel I relaxed the script to some degree, as well as my presenting.

HCJ 4 – New Journalism

History and Society

Yellow press – this was the first form of sensationalism. It’s news for all classes in a simple language style. They had huge, emotive headlines with big pictures. the stories are exciting and had great interest – dramatic, romantic, crime. This is all very similar to the Sun.

This is journalism without a soul.

It is very formulaic, very much how we produce journalism now. Where what when who how.

The 1960s was when this exploded, and it was all very much to do with what was happening in society. There were many progressions, such as the sexual revolution and human rights (black, womens). There was also the vietnam war which brought about the ‘hippy’ movement, which also involved much drug culture. All of this, of course seeped into the music of the era – The Beatles, The Doors, Bob Dylan.

Tom Wolfe

Digetic (telling) to mimetic (seeing).

He is very much ‘gonzo’. He covered features, which was news but not hard news, so he had to create its own category and meaning. News articles with real, intimate dialogue.

In order to do this, he said there must be four things:

• Scene by scene recording of events
• Complete and emotive dialogue
• Third person – like a camera
• Every day details need to be recorded

This was perfect for society as the people wanted their voices heard, not just the bureaucrats.

Existentialism

Authenticity and bad faith – there was a feeling of anti-establishment. We will dismantle oppression board by board. The policeman in your head must be destroyed. 

Press releases are just statements from the establishment – are they true? Do they really give a rounded reflection of events? Journalists strive to cut down the bureaucratic rubbish and deliver the true stories. There needs to be plot, feelings, direct quotes, images.

HCJ 4 – Existentialism

Independence, passion, and freedom. Basically America.

Hiedegger

Dasein and authenticity.

To give your life meaning, you must have ‘Dasein’ – emotional, passionate, your interaction with the world with thought to your own being. We don’t just think about the world, so Descartes is wrong. It’s your desires, and what you’re aiming for in the future, and how useful you are right now. If you want to become a cricketer, for example, you must practice in cricketing, not baking for example.

There’s no point in thinking about the external world – if you are doing something and engaging in the world, then that is you living, regardless of whether or not it is a dream.

I am therefore I think, rather than I think therefore I am.

If you are doing this, then you are being authentic. If you are doing other activities which aren’t your passion or your own actions, then you are being unauthentic.

Husserl

Intentionality, directedness.

Scientifically analyse the mind. Your thoughts can be distinguished by physical and mental. Mental phenomena are based on objects – intentionality, even if it isn’t real (a dream like object, or physical). Whether or not there is reality outside of our thinking is another matter and Husserl didn’t care for this, but we know what is going on in our own mind for sure.

Once again, he is against Descartes – I am therefore I think, rather than I think therefore I am. solipsism = wrong.

Satre

Bad faith

Thoughts are transcendental – he didn’t like Hume’s theory that thoughts were only of an internal world. You find ideas in the external world. Emotions are only perceived – if someone is depressed, then you perceive them of that, not that they themselves are depressed.

Without thinking, there is just pure being. We are the only beings who are like this – our choices are our reason for living, we can choose to not eat or not live. Other things, such as plants, cannot choose.

We must choose our own morals and life, because it is the only thing we have. Bad faith is following someone else’s moral code, e.g. religion, and it shows that you are not being true to yourself. You are being cowardly if you have bad faith. You need to be yourself.

HCJ 4 – Economics

over production and under consumption.

Keynes

Keynes’s theory of economic can be very communistic, believing that we are all in this together. He believes that we all live in a cycle of earning and spending, so we therefore depend on each other to spend in order to earn. Therefore, when the Great Depression hit the economy, it was the result of people restricting their spending, so people couldn’t earn, and it just went into a downwards spiral really.

This is where the communism aspect kicks in fully – he believes that if there is too much of an imbalance of overly rich and poor people, the government should be depended on to redistribute money and restore order. People can then spend in order to earn and keep the flow going.

Adam Smith

Smith opposes Keynes very much – he believes that we are all self regulating machines. We should live long and prosper, but independently and only care about our own earnings.

We as humans will fill in the holes in the market, we are naturally entrepreneurial. We are free and have self-interest, but are guided by the ‘invisible hand’ – this helps us not decend into chaos and anarchy.

Malthus

Population is what concerned Malthus – if the population keeps growing at a faster rate than what can feed it, and if it is unmonitored, then it will double and there will be great inbalance.

Ricardo

Labour theory of value. This basically means the amount of labour put into making something should play a big part in how much it should be valued.

Marx

People can appear to be free, but are in fact in chains – Rousseau. This is created by capitalism because people begin to value things over others. There is competition, greed, and inequality.

Work is the loss of one’s self, and we are alienated from our higher needs – work is other people’s needs. It is the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie.

Check my earlier blog on Karl Marx for more information.

Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck

Weber – “little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones” can be applied to the book and karl marx. The book is about the stock market crash and can be related to keynes book which is the aftermath of the great depression.

Malthus – population. The characters thought they would move and become much more rich, but they found it was over populated with other people who also wanted to earn, so they ended up not having opportunities.

HCJ 4 – Totalitarianism

This was my seminar paper for the semester.

What is Totalitarianism?

Totalitarianism is a societal structure that gives all power and central control to the government. Not only does totalitarianist regimes try to control society politically, but in every aspect of life – it competely controls the nation it is governing.

Examples of this was Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. A current example would be North Korea.

Hitler:

• Propaganda controlling people’s thoughts
• Hitler and the law of nature (undesirables), this legitimising his goals
• By killing off undesirables, Nazi Germany would stay in power and society would not change.

George Orwell

Orwell, a great author and journalist, wrote critiques of Marxism and Communism – examples of totalitarianism. His work demonstrates how the great ideal – utopia – becomes corrupted. ‘The God that failed’. There is only self-delusion.

He was horrified by the totalitarian attempt to control minds and language. He believed that thoughts are made of words, so if there is a control of language, then there is a control of thought. Mass media therefore enslaves minds.

His most notable piece was 1984, which demonstrates his thinking effectively. Elements that do so in the novel are:

• The whole idea of ‘Big Brother’ – one unbeatable force that looks over your every move, controlling every action you make.
• No diaries allowed to be kept (no private thoughts allowed to be recorded, only Big Brother’s ideals), no sex, generally no privacy.
• ‘WAR IS PEACE;FREEDOM IS SLAVERY;POVERTY IS PLENTY.’ – this is full of euphemisms, and reduces all phrases to ‘I love big brother’.
• NewSpeak – there is such thing as thought crime.

language

As I have said previously, propaganda is totalitarian as it is forcing an ideal on a whole country, practically brainwashing the people by exposing them to these ideas over and over, every day.

On a similar level, advertising is very much ‘Orwellian’ and brainwashing. We are exposed to it daily – inbetween television programmes, on public transport, as we walk down the street.

The language used by the media is often misleading and overcomplicated – we don’t always understand what is truly meant by the metaphors or similes used. You should always avoid using cliche language, longer words, and always used active rather tan passive language (the cat sat on the mat, rather than the mat was sat on by the cat).

Terror and Ideology

Terror is the essence of Totalitarianist domination. It isolates and singles out the opposition, which can ultimately eliminate the classes or races that are undesired, or the ideologies that don’t fit within the totalitarian society.

‘Terror is the realisation of the law of movement’ – it is used to stabilise man and allow natural and historical law.

Natural law, which can be outlined by Sir Thomas Aquinas, has 5 principles – live, learn, reproduce, worship God, and live harmoniously within society. This, matched with the leaders’ ideologies and terror, can amount to an incredibly strong totalitarian society. For example, Hitler did in fact promote these 5 principles with his ideologies in mind – the undesirables, killing of jews and other outcasts within Nazi Germany. He wanted his own super race of Germans.

Ideologies can ultimately blind us. They are independent from our natural senses, and if forced they can cause great damage. They can become weapons.

Totalitarian society relies on inner tyranny, the tyranny of logic. Terror allows this as you can become psychologically scared and change your actual thinking, not only physical habits.

HCJ4 – Logic

Gottlob Frege

Frege puts an end to Aristotle logic. His analytic, or symbolic, puts an end to Aristotle’s syllogistic logic.

Aristotle originally explained that if we take ‘all men are mortal’ as an empirically derived statement, and we then say that Socrates is a man, that MUST mean that Socrates is mortal. This is an axiom, a statement that the evidence claims the statement must be true with no argument.

However, Frege formed propositional syllogism. He discovered that ‘if’ is the most powerful word in logic.  Removes the need for geometric axioms, according to Hume and Kant, can only exists in mathematics.

 

With Frege, there is no need for axioms. Arguments are turned into functions.

Example:

“IF Socrates is a man” is the ARGUMENT

“THEN he is mortal” is the FUNCTION

The structure of the proposition is THE OPERATOR.

 

MORNING STAR EVENING STAR – We can refer to things differently, but ultimately it can be the same thing. Venus can be described as both the morning star and the evening star, but this isn’t true just from analysing language, it has to be empirically determined. Since we know that the morning star and the evening star are both Venus, we can say “the morning star = the evening star”. This can be similar to ‘all swans are white’ – there were in fact black swans, and this was only known through empirical observation, not just analysing language.

 

HCJ 3 – Nietzsche

Nietzsche is pretty much as controversial as you can get when considering philosophers, and is very much on par with Schopenhauer (link to that blog).

WILL TO POWER

Nietzsche believed that the main driving force in the human race is the ‘will to power’. What he means by ‘will to power’ is the sheer force of personality and willingness to do anything to gain power.

But what gives someone the right to power? We can have a revisit to last year’s HCJ topics with different social contract theories:

Hobbes – Leviathan

Rousseau – general will

Machiavelli – Divine right

From these three theories, the one that fits best with Nietzsche’s definition of power is Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Leviathan is made up of the masses.

But what gives this Leviathan the right to power? There is a social contract between the masses and the rulers that if you give up all your rights except your rights to property, life and (something), then the Leviathan will protect you from the anarchy that would inevitably happen if there was no ruler.

The ‘Leviathan’ in Nietzsche’s case would be a superior kind of person called the ‘ubermensch’, and the masses would be the ‘undermensch’.

UBERMENSCH

The people who practise their will to power are called the ubermensch. The ubermensch are strong individuals who find their own way and force their way to the top. ‘Humanity is something that must be overcome’.  The ubermensch are a kind of ‘superhuman’ who are above animalistic human urges and impulses. They do not care about these pursuits of normal people – pleasure, fighting, so on. Suffering is valuable.

He believed that aristocracy was very important as those who were part of it has ubermensch in their lineage, and they therefore come from greatness.

The popular term ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is very much the simplest way to describe Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Examples of Ubermensch are Napoleon, Hitler, Spartan society.

MORALITY AND RELIGION

Nietzsche has a ‘master morality’ which entails that morality is outlined by the consequences of your actions, despite who or what you may have to step on.

This is the opposite of ‘slave morality’ which depends on your sympathy for the lower classes. This is very much what Nietzsche disliked and looked down upon.

Morality as we know, the Christian type of good and bad, is unimportant to Nietzsche – he doesn’t care whether or not you hold the door open for a stranger or if you kill people. He would view Hitler as an ubermensch as he overcame the masses and became very powerful. The fact that he would then go on to kill millions of people is only trivial to Nietzsche.

Religion, to Nietzsche, is weak and pulls you away from reality. In Zarathustra he makes a bold statement that many people remember him by to this day – ‘God is dead’. By this he doesn’t mean it literally in an angsty way, but instead he means that because religious people are so detached from the world (Christian belief in the veil of tears – ‘this life may be bad, but be morally good and you will get what you want in the next life’)

There is slave morality (sympathy for lower classes), and master morality (good or bad consequences, teleological).

Religion promoted a meek and inferior kind of living – veil of tears. Nevermind about this life being bad, the next life will be so much better.

This is similar to Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’.

Schopenhauer

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had very similar ideology. They both believed that women were evil and useless – Schopenhauer more because they were the bearers of life, and so they are terrible.

The only way to escape this pain which is life is to die. Oblivion is just a way of having glimpses of death.

HCJ 3 – Freud

FREUD
His theory is based on unhappiness and how we can escape it – he did this by getting case studies and using their unhappy experience as an example.

Utilitarian’s mistake is that we think we can rationalise ourselves out of unhappiness – but really we can never escape the unhappiness in our lives, only vent our pain and learn to understand it – this is psychoanalysis. We need to deal with our irrationality.

The unconscious is where irrationalisty is – you cannot get to it through your own conscious thinking, but the unconscious will come out in a conscious moment (Freudian slip).

PLATO

Direct attack on plato – freud took the tripartite self – reason, spirit desire. Allegory of the chariot.
Crucial difference – plato believed that reason could rule the others – freud thought that reason was the weakest because people are irrational. So reason cannot be in charge of the ‘chariot’.
We are driven by desires that are beyond our control, beyond out conscious mind

MARX

Tripartite self – natural, alienated, species self
Communist society, the needs of the species self would finally become dominate (teleological). Marx believes in the infinite potential of human nature – of its ability to develop, even envelop. Freud rejects this – its too idealistic, our basic needs are not benign.

Hobbes and Machiavelli 

Our deepest needs are aggression and the condition of man is war (Hobbes) – it is our human nature.

The Leviathan is an example of the superego.
He believes that through psychoanalysis he has discovered truths about the unconscious that were never know before, and this is why he dismisses plato and marx.

PERSONALITY

Our lives are full of pain and suffering out of our own internal division
Mind is divided into three: ID, EGO, SUPEREGO.
ID – animal part, aim to gain pleasure and avoid pain, the reservoir of the unconscious. ‘a cauldron of seething excitations’. Demanding expression, fulfilment, but we can never be aware of its dominance (spoilt child)
EGO – reality, the least powerful part of the personality – the voice of reason. Moderation, common sense. Who we like to think we are.
SUPEREGO – Internalised rules of parents or society. This isn’t innate. The policeman in your head (reich) is totally irrational (ID). Socialisation. An internal ideal – impossible standards of perfection, and punishes with guilt. Morality principle – often uses religion.
Civilisation is a collective superego – imposing limits on the ID – love your neighbour as ourselves is silly, and even more so is ‘love your enemy’.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Society is full of suffering because it is full of pain – our own decaying body, nature and external world, the greater pain is the interaction with other people as we are all inclined to hurt others.

The answer is psychoanalysis – a way to access the id. But other coping mechanisms are: chemical solution (drink and drugs), isolation (temporary and only for a few people), religion as a type of sublimation (mass delusion).
Sublimation – finding socially acceptable ways of getting out aggression – football, venting our aggression. Real satisfaction. Also obsession is a part of the id and sublimation. Hypnosis, pressure method, free association and dreams (the royal road to the unconscious). Dreams show the ID.

The thought that things stem from our childhood is Freudian. General feeling of this semester – life is a curse. You don’t have a right to happiness – everything is unpleasant.

Kenny

The greater part of the mind is the subconscious, but Freud didn’t experiment enough to prove this. This is why Freud is more subjective than objective (like the scientific method) – he is not a scientist. He doesn’t experiemnt, but bases all his theories on individually differing case studies.
Sexual oppression results in mental illness. Schopenhauer = sex (something)
Jung and Reich – they both have the same idea, but more like a beta version of Freud’s theories. The idea that you are introverted, extroverted, so on. The study of the personality.

WINOL Week 5 and Package Crash Course

This week I was unable to get a health story, so I produced the OOV belt for the bulletin. What I learnt from this was simply how to make an OOV belt. I collected together the images that the other reporters gathered and put them together with script for the presenter to say during the recording of the bulletin.

Notes on the bulletin by our guest editor, Chris C:

• Headlines – danger if the words said and read aren’t the same for there to be confusion
• Presenting – relax and look up, be more natural
• Jobs – ‘months of uncertainty’ = good and takes it beyond the issue. Pictures – use relevant ones. ‘moral remains high’ – challenge. Graphics – impossible to take it in. Not so many figures and tell the viewer what they’re looking at.
• Storm – talk to some people somehow. Make it more relevant at the end, or more human-interest related
• Nadine – make more of the story. Challenge what she said.
• Murder – use shots of the court, the accused again. Good to refer to paper.
• Books – confusing name over wrong person, Romania – needs to be bigger or not there,
• Coming up – badly written
• Lucy – sometimes need to drop stuff when it’s not interesting

 

After the debrief, Ian Anderson gave us a crash course in package making. Here are the notes I took from it:

• Impact in beginning, substance in the middle, and conclude/round off nicely at the end (either go back to the start, end with piece to camera, shots to end, or say how it will go further)
• Need a narrative through picture – something print/web can’t do
• Natural sound, sequences, writing to pictures. These are what’s needed.

Example packages – he showed us a couple of packages from the BBC, and this is what I took from them:

• Lead into the story
• Continuity – see one thing in one shot, then the same thing in another makes it easier to tell story and make it flow
• Multiple sequences of shots, continue to tell the story
• Tilt down to papers also counts as cutaway when interviewing.

HCJ 3 – Max Weber

This was my seminar paper:

Bureaucracy

•Power over the masses at all times.

• The bureaucracy – government, essentially – is only so if it can have a permanent almost omnipotence over the masses i.e. us.

•Legitimacy of the power depends on sustainability

• Whether or not this power is legitimate or real depends on whether or not it will be able to hold us ad control us.

•It should be implicit (absolute, unquestioned)

•Contrasts with Hobbes (Leviathan), Locke (Life, liberty, property; legitimacy from consent).

•Example – American government shutdown

• This is an example from how even the government is shut down temporarily (and that did create a big hault), there was still a control over the USA.

authority

There are three types:

1. Traditional
2. Charmismatic
3. Legal/Rational

Traditional

•Custom or habit domination by patriarch.

• Basically how it always has been – the aristocratic patriarchy rule everything and they always will because that’s how it’s always been.

•You do stuff because it has always been done

•For example – feudal lords, parental authority

Charismatic

•Personal charisma – ‘gift of grace’

•Weber said a “certain quality of an individual’s personality which is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or exceptional powers and qualities.”

•People become ‘starstruck’ and feel duty – ‘herd mentality’. It can be adapted to Freud’s superego ( internalisation of cultural rules).

•Charismatic leaders are usually seen as a ‘revolutionary force’ – Obama.

•HOWEVER it isn’t compatible with rational power because it dislikes routine and rules. Case by case decisions. Fully dependent on the individual. Revelation. (Locke said we should only have personal revelation, don’t pose it on anyone else).

•If charismatic authority is successful, it instantly becomes routine, and then eventually becomes traditional or rational/legal.

Legal/Rational

•Weber = a state/government is the monopoly of force. This is what Weber though a bureaucracy was (‘bureau’ = desk, ‘cracy’ = power).

•It can be compared to the Leviathan – a mortal god with unlimited power

•Power comes from stripping it from elsewhere

•Heavily dependent on ‘rules of law’. Public officials.

•This is the most efficient system because it is technically competent and predictable.

•Bureaucracy is usually associated with red tape (‘red tape’ across to stop you from going outside where you are meant to)

•Doesn’t allow common sense.

•Weber was influenced by Prussian bureaucracy. Prussia = amazing development

characteristics of a bureaucracy

•Either by agreement or it can be imposed, but also shared values

•Legal system has to be consistent

•Authority must be impersonal

•However – traditional you could make up laws.

•Modern legal-rational authority – there is a separation between those who implement rules and establish them.

•When working in a Bureaucracy, there has to be legally free individuals. You have to choose to become part of a Bureaucracy.

•Hierarchy is all workplaces – lifelong career consists of working up a ladder.

•Meritocratic tendency – there is power in those who hold merit, who have more training – education. This is ‘credentialism’.

Criticisms

•Impossible to handle individuals, there are no unique or special events. Apathetic.

•Oligarchy (few officials at the top), carries on.

•Freud’s super ego and herd mentality still applies – we look for leaders in the hierarchy who would exercise their own judgement.

•Weber –  little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones.

•It isn’t rational or moral in the achievement of goals

•Extreme = Nazi Germany – camps.

•Individuals are specialised in areas with limited responsibility and authority, basic moral questions were never asked

•Militarism – they claim that searching out enemies is a form of defence, the military used to manipulate the masses – national danger

•The individual is destroyed – ‘man is the measure of all things’ (protagorus) is now ignored. No one can live outside the state.